Vanderbilt University Medical Center has received a five-year, $4.5 million grant from the National Human Genome Research Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health, to assess clinical outcomes and economic value of screening large, diverse health care populations for disease risk using polygenic risk scores.
A polygenic risk score (PRS) uses hundreds to thousands of genetic variants in a person’s genome to measure genetic risk for a given disease.
“VUMC is particularly well suited to lead this type of translational research, thanks to decades of investment in data banking and data tools for studying real-world biomedical phenomena with an eye to advancing precision medicine,” said principal investigator Josh Peterson, MD, MPH, professor of Biomedical Informatics and Medicine, director of the Center for Precision Medicine, and vice-president for Personalized Health.
Peterson will collaborate with two other principal investigators, David Veenstra, PhD, PharmD, of the University of Washington in Seattle, and Jing Hao, PhD, MD, MS, MPH, of Geisinger Health System, headquartered in Danville, Pennsylvania. The project also relies on modeling expertise of John Graves, PhD, associate professor of Health Policy, Jonathan Schildcrout, PhD, professor of Biostatistics, and Shawn Garbett, MS, assistant in Biostatistics.